Go West

Demo Time

We’re going to be giving Fragmental its 3rd hands-on public outing tomorrow night, and this one is easily the biggest test to date of the game that we’ve created.

Our first appearance was back in November, when we featured at “Games are for Everyone” in Edinburgh. This was a showcase for a lot of indie games in various staged of development. Hosted in a pub, with the bar literally 5m away, the setting was pretty much perfect for a game such as Fragmental, and as hoped it went down a storm.

December arrived, and with it came our second public showing. This time the host venue was the Megabytes café in Glasgow, a café themed around games, both modern & retro. This was a slightly harder sell, as people were mainly coming into the venue for a panini and coffee, or just as a way to get out of the lovely Glasgow weather. For anyone not from around these parts, that last bit was most definitely sarcasm.

The Perfect Build

Now into the new year, and we’re currently pushing hard to create a solid, stable build for our 3rd hands-on event, “GlesGames: Galaxy” in Glasgow.

There is a general process that we go through to get the game into a state that we are happy to show off to the public. In the case of Fragmental, this last week has seen us focus on a sub set of content which we know we can easily control, which will also avoid dropping new players in at the deep end. The addition of rulesets has allowed us to increase variation in this focused set of maps by defining different sets of weaponry and modifiers that will or won’t appear in each level. Wait until you play your first Power Glove only level. Or your first, frankly ridiculous, Disc Gun only level. Brilliant.

A big part of this week has also been spent on getting a 1st pass of a cut down Front End implemented. Its fine having debug info or placeholder images everywhere while we’re working on the game in the studio, but its not something we really want end users to have to see. That way we can pretend that everything we do always looks amazing and polished! Gary’s done some great work on the post-round score screen, making it much easier to see who you’ve killed and who has in turn killed you – which are hugely important in a game where Rounds can last 0.5 seconds.

As of today we have locked down the build, meaning that only absolutely critical bug fixes are taken. While I’m currently sat at my desk righting this, the rest of the team are playtesting the build looking for any last bugs that we think should be fixed ahead of tomorrow’s show.

As a company, and as individuals, we’ve gone through this process many times now, but that doesn’t mean it always goes smoothly. Just yesterday we found an evil crash bug that was only fixed through a series of at first glance unlinked suggestions. Turns out if you won a round while still having a Redeemer (manually controlled missile) in flight, then when the next map tried to load it would crash the game due to faulty garbage collection. But of course it would. Obvious really.

I’m getting so much mileage out of this Jackie Chan image. Wonder how I can use it next time?

As mentioned in the opening of this blog, the Glesgames event will be the biggest gameplay test that Fragmental has had for a couple of reasons:

The attendees should be pretty much slap bang in the middle of our target demographic.

The other games on show are mostly released games, and they’re a little bit on the good side.

GlesGames

GlesGames advertise themselves as “A local multiplayer video game event, based in Glasgow”. I’ve not been to one of their events yet, but it looks like a haven for hard core multiplayer games players to meet and compete, meaning that a game is going to have to really stand out and bring something new if it’s to garner any attention from all the established multiplayer games on offer. Imagine taking along along your lovely new racing game, then finding yourself set up next to Mario Kart…

That poster doesn’t even give you the full line-up, there are a few standard heavy hitters that don’t even make it onto the advertising:

Towerfall Ascension

Mario Kart 8

Mount Your Friends

Gang Beasts

Nidhogg

Ultra Street Fighter IV

…

It would be accurate to say that even with the overwhelmingly positive feedback we’ve received so far, there are still a lot of nerves in the team over this demo, but nerves are good. They push you to work harder and make the game better.

Nerves or no, Glesgames should be the perfect testing ground for Fragmental. Right from the very start when we were pitching concepts internally to the team, I’ve had this memory stuck in my head of the nights my group of mates would finish an evening in the pub, then pile back to a randomly selected person’s house to play Goldeneye / Mario Kart / Bomberman / for hours. It would get loud. There would be shouting. There would be swearing. There would be complaints from other family members about the last two things. (Ally, Paul.D, Paul.S, Mike, Jason – thanks guys!) Let’s do a quick checklist of Glesgames against my teenage gaming years…

Beers: Check

Competitive games: Check

Noisy banter: Check

Shouting / Swearing: Check

Annoyed family members: If this happens, I’ll be freaked out

In fact that checklist could pretty much be applied to the Ruffian office as well. Apart from (1) & (5). Actually, sometimes (1), but definitely only late on a Friday afternoon. Here’s what it looks like:

Early Access

There is a second reason this demo is a big deal for us – it will be a fairly accurate representation of what our first early access release on Steam will be. Unless something catastrophic happens, the levels, weapons, modifiers, game modes and music in this demo will be the same as the ones you’ll see if (when!) you purchase this first build. We have a plan in place for regular updates, but are not quite ready to announce anything concrete yet. As this is completely our own game here at Ruffian, for once we are not bound by publisher deadlines, so if we feel that we need to extend the project length in order to squeeze in another cool feature, budget permitting, we at least have the option to do so.

The question of what to include in the first Early Access build has been one that has been discussed at length in the Ruffian office, and only recently have we reached a consensus that everyone is happy with. Too much content means we delay getting the game out there, leaving little time for feedback from the players and the iteration passes that would follow. Too little content and you guys would (rightly) feel hard done by, and won’t be able to get a true feeling of what the game can do.

As it stands, we’re confident we have the core gameplay nailed down, and most of the future updates will be additional content (more levels, more weapons, more modifiers, more game modes etc), with the remaining non-gameplay features coming online at regular intervals after the Early Access launch (e.g. network play).

The exciting news is that we’re close to releasing Fragmental on Steam Early Access. Keep checking back here for more news regarding this as there will be more information in the very near future!